Just as we have grown accustomed to stories of increasingly small planets being discovered around distant stars, along comes a new study that ups the ante. This week, for the first time ever, scientists have announced evidence of icy comets orbiting a sun-like star about 160 light-years from Earth....

Turns out having "stellar" weather can be pretty unpleasant. Scientists using NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have discovered a long-lived storm on a cool dwarf star that’s reminiscent of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The findings, appearing in the Astrophysical Journal, shed light on the...

Get ready, sky watchers -- it's time for the Geminids, one of the best meteor showers of the year. The Geminid meteor shower occurs each December, when Earth passes through a river of debris left in the wake of an object known as Phaethon 3200. This year the Geminids, so named because the meteors...

The dwarf planet Ceres may have a mottled past and a strangely active present, according to data sent back by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. The findings, published in a pair of papers in the journal Nature, reveal (respectively) that the early solar system may have undergone a surprising amount of mixing...

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the highest definition images of Pluto yet, and they are spectacular. In the video above, the dwarf planet's landscape is revealed in unprecedented detail, allowing viewers to peer into craters, examine the fine details of a distant mountain range and...

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has found thousands of prospective planets around nearby stars. But the trick is often in confirming whether they’re real or fakes. Now, a new study of gas giant planets in the Kepler dataset finds that more than half of these candidates are false positives, a rate much...

The annual Leonid meteor shower is expected to peak late Tuesday and early Wednesday, and you can watch it live, right here. Beginning at 5 p.m., astronomy website Slooh.com will provide a live feed of the night sky from telescopes in five countries on four continents. Watching the celestial...

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More from Space

A small planet, just a bit bigger than Earth, has been spotted in our stellar neighborhood, just 39 light-years away. Known as GJ 1132b, it is the closest rocky exoplanet to have ever been found, and astronomers say it could provide our most in-depth look yet at an alien world not so different...

It's black. It's massive. It's shaped like a skull. Meet the dead comet that will fly safely past Earth this Halloween. At 10 a.m. on Halloween morning, a mysterious and vaguely skull-shaped body from space will hurtle past our planet, coming within 1.3 times the distance between the Earth and...

Just in time for Halloween, NASA has released ghostly images of the icy geysers shooting out of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. More data taken during the Cassini spacecraft’s deepest-ever dive through the plume will be released in coming days as scientists use the spacecraft’s data to answer questions...

Scientists from the Rosetta mission have found oxygen in the atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a discovery that could change our understanding of how the solar system formed. The molecular oxygen (O2) was detected by the ROSINA mass spectrometer, one of a suite of instruments aboard...

Summer may be long since over, but NASA’s Cassini spacecraft wants to make one more run through the sprinklers. The probe will be plunging through the plumes of salty water spraying from the southern pole of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus on Wednesday, in an attempt to learn more about the ocean within....

Astronauts are not the only life forms to inhabit the International Space Station. The ISS is also home to trillions of microscopic space dwellers that live in the air and on the surfaces of the floating space laboratory. This community of fungus and bacteria make up the space station's unique...